recently i just finished building a new pc. mostly for gaming since my only exposure to linux is steam os and i heard its uses arch with kde plasma so i try to emulate it as close as i can. however soon i realized how different it is and it requires more setup than i initially thought. i spent a whole day or two setting it up and i read now im responsible on maintaining it, what does it mean? is it just finding and testing drivers? or system update? what is the easiest way to do it? and what i getting myself into?
when i was about to install steam i found a tutorial on it with 3 - 4 pages full of text and was a bit overwhelmed, i decided just set it up using discover with flatpak, the problem is when i was about to find out how to do that i read mostly people really hate when you ask how to enable it in arch, is it really bad? should i just use konsole instead?
im not very tech savvy and at first I was really reluctant to use konsole but since i decided to use arch its inevitable that i have to use konsole and so far its not that bad, yet.
I’m just wondering for the long term, should i just change distro? or i should just powertrough arch and see where it goes.
thank you for your time.
edit:
thank you for all the kind words, support and information everyone. i decided that i’ll stick with arch until it breaks and ill see either i retry arch or try different linux flavors. i never feels so excited about os since i was messing around in win 2000
if you’re a first timer and already got arch with kde set up you’re pretty fucking tech savvy ngl
But that doesn’t mean it’s a good place to start.
Try Linux Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Any of these will be easier than Arch and offer point and click installation for steam, drivers, and just about anything else.
When you get some more experience, instead of arch you can try endeavourOS. it’s basically arch with good defaults and has a fantastic KDE implementation.
For gaming focused PC I’d look at Bazzite. OP wants it to be like the Steam Deck, it’s just perfect for that.
I almost always advise against atomic distros for noobs. They are extremely limiting, add multiple complications to otherwise simple tasks, and the padded cell of immutability means you can’t really fuck around and learn how traditional Linux systems work.
I’m usually distro agnostic and just happy to see people use whatever Linux they like, but immutables have issues.
So OP should start over? Just offering your unnecessary opinion? (Remember they read this) Go with the compliment and move on
Yes start over.
Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS, Fedora.
Save your important files on a separate drive, install your new beginner friendly OS of choice, and don’t be afraid to break it. A reinstall from a USB stick takes like 15 minutes, and with your important files stored separately you don’t have to think twice about wiping the system and starting over.
OP should follow their chosen path and we should commend them for their efforts and support their choices rather than tell them they did it wrong and start over according to our opinions.
In my experience of maintaining Arch, it’s as simple as:
-Keep your packages up to date -Keep your mirrorlist up to date -install a package called “pacdiff” and run it after every update (certain config files need to be manually replaced/updated after system updates, pacdiff handles this for you. This actually includes your mirrorlist).
Anything else really just boils down to individual issues with packages which could happen on any distro, or really and OS in general. As another user said, if you got Arch installed as a newer Linux user, you’re already doing well.
